> In my view the ongoing race to the bottom of slave labour to make cheaper systems is not sustainable.
As someone who has worked in consumer electronics, and worked closely with the people who were on the factory line, employees on electronics manufacturing lines are not slave labor. They are often times well paid, with pay that would make for a good living in more rural parts of the US. After having worked on a production line for a year, they are in a good bargaining position to up their pay for the next year[1], sometime I got to witness as my team had to basically pay a bonus to get people to come back to work after the spring festival.
Do some employers suck? Of course[2]. It is important for the companies placing these orders to ensure workers are treated well, I know when I was at MSFT we had guidelines in place for worker treatment, including an increase minimum age for workers vs what the local law allowed.
I also don't think a lot of people realize that for any production line in China making complicated American designed electronics, that there are likely Americans also on the factory floor helping things out! Especially at the beginning of the production run. None of the people I know who were on the factory floor would have been silent if they had seen abuses, abuses of the people they worked day in and day out with for weeks and sometimes months.
I'm not saying horrible abuses don't happen, but I am saying that it is possible, and not some insanely difficult task, to responsibly manufacture goods in China, or any other country for that matter.
BTW, everything is made in China because China has a ton of local expertise, engineering talent, and ease of sourcing parts. For complicated to make products, the labor savings really isn't the big driver.
[1] Yield rates go up significantly with experienced employees.
[2] There is a lot of pressure to make release dates for consumer electronics, missing certain holidays for release means an entire product may not sell enough units to be profitable anymore. Does this mean crap tons of stress for everyone involved? Unfortunately yes, if you work in higher end consumer electronics you will see people fall apart all around you, it is a very high stress environment. It sucks that the stress is also put on the lowest paid workers in the chain, and more needs to be done to stop that from happening.
> They are often times well paid, with pay that would make for a good living in more rural parts of the US.
That might be the case now, but manufacturing moved to China decades ago partly because of cheap labor and as a cost saving measure for companies building elsewhere.
> BTW, everything is made in China because China has a ton of local expertise, engineering talent, and ease of sourcing parts.
Everything is made in China because everything else is made in China. I.e. the momentum is already built for everything to be cheaply made there, so no external manufacturing can compete on prices or equipment.
The issue is that in the race to the bottom to build everything cheaply, quickly and in large quantities, is that you get a ton of low quality products that become junk soon after purchase. And given the total disregard for intellectual property, any company sharing any manufacturing details with Chinese manufacturers must either have strong on-site control and oversight of the process, or deal with the fact that the market will soon be flooded with counterfeit products of their design.
> The issue is that in the race to the bottom to build everything cheaply, quickly and in large quantities, is that you get a ton of low quality products that become junk soon after purchase.
You'll get from China factories what you order, and then verify the quality of, from Chinese factories.
Same as US factories.
Apple products are made in China. Some of the finest engineered and assembled consumer electronics ever made.
Teslas are made in the US, panel gaps and all. Lots of Italian made sports cars have utter trash quality control.
> That might be the case now, but manufacturing moved to China decades ago partly because of cheap labor and as a cost saving measure for companies building elsewhere.
That was 30 years ago. NYC used to be a hot bed of cheap manufacturing as well, 100 years ago.
> You'll get from China factories what you order, and then verify the quality of, from Chinese factories.
Agreed. I mentioned that in my last point about IP, which you conveniently ignored.
Apple is an outlier. For every such company, there are thousands of others abroad and local to China that are making absolute trash that only serves to scam consumers and/or end up in landfills shortly after purchase.
I can't count how many Chinese-made things I've bought that ended up in the trash a few days/weeks/months after purchase. I also own a lot of poorly made Chinese electronics that have survived for years, so technically they pass QA, but are cheap feeling and annoying to use despite being expensive. Lenovo laptops come to mind.
Have you seen how rampant this is on Amazon, Wish.com, et al, let alone on Chinese owned retailers? There are entire product categories where you can't avoid buying a shoddy product simply because no alternative exists. I spend hours scouring Amazon to find brand names and sellers I can trust in an attempt to avoid this, dodging page after page of knockoff garbage. It's absolutely exhausting, and often impossible to avoid. A lot of people have given up entirely on purchasing from Amazon, but the convenience is a big factor for me.
So, yes, there are some products made in China with strict quality control that are worthwhile owning. But most are just quick waste making some shady CEOs rich. In either case, they'll most likely be copied and eventually made as cheaply as possible.[1][2]
> Agreed. I mentioned that in my last point about IP, which you conveniently ignored.
Apologizes, you did indeed mention it, I was on mobile and skimmed past it.
> I can't count how many Chinese-made things I've bought that ended up in the trash a few days/weeks/months after purchase. I also own a lot of poorly made Chinese electronics that have survived for years, so technically they pass QA, but are cheap feeling and annoying to use despite being expensive. Lenovo laptops come to mind.
Having been to China multiple times, they have perfectly good electronics for sale domestically. Heck for some product categories, the electronics over there are better than what you can get in the United States.
> Have you seen how rampant this is on Amazon, Wish.com, et al, let alone on Chinese owned retailers?
Wish.com's entire business model is cheap crap. They are the online equivalent of a dollar store.
The problem on Amazon is real, although I sometimes encounter some really good Chinese made products, not electronic but I recently purchased a shoe rack from a Chinese retailer on Amazon and it is worlds better than any of the shoe racks American brands are selling.
I also remember a4tech back in the day, they had some absolutely amazing mice! I still miss my duel scroll wheel optical mouse, I loved that thing.
> It's absolutely exhausting, and often impossible to avoid. A lot of people have given up entirely on purchasing from Amazon, but the convenience is a big factor for me.
My issue is that American brands are also making crap products. You have companies like DJI making products so good that they put American competitors right out of business.
But you also have a strange lack of quality smart watches out of China, figure someone who cares would make a smartwatch with quality firmware. I am genuinely confused as to why this hasn't happened yet.
As someone who has worked in consumer electronics, and worked closely with the people who were on the factory line, employees on electronics manufacturing lines are not slave labor. They are often times well paid, with pay that would make for a good living in more rural parts of the US. After having worked on a production line for a year, they are in a good bargaining position to up their pay for the next year[1], sometime I got to witness as my team had to basically pay a bonus to get people to come back to work after the spring festival.
Do some employers suck? Of course[2]. It is important for the companies placing these orders to ensure workers are treated well, I know when I was at MSFT we had guidelines in place for worker treatment, including an increase minimum age for workers vs what the local law allowed.
I also don't think a lot of people realize that for any production line in China making complicated American designed electronics, that there are likely Americans also on the factory floor helping things out! Especially at the beginning of the production run. None of the people I know who were on the factory floor would have been silent if they had seen abuses, abuses of the people they worked day in and day out with for weeks and sometimes months.
I'm not saying horrible abuses don't happen, but I am saying that it is possible, and not some insanely difficult task, to responsibly manufacture goods in China, or any other country for that matter.
BTW, everything is made in China because China has a ton of local expertise, engineering talent, and ease of sourcing parts. For complicated to make products, the labor savings really isn't the big driver.
[1] Yield rates go up significantly with experienced employees. [2] There is a lot of pressure to make release dates for consumer electronics, missing certain holidays for release means an entire product may not sell enough units to be profitable anymore. Does this mean crap tons of stress for everyone involved? Unfortunately yes, if you work in higher end consumer electronics you will see people fall apart all around you, it is a very high stress environment. It sucks that the stress is also put on the lowest paid workers in the chain, and more needs to be done to stop that from happening.